Motion CL900

Motion has a background in extremely rugged tablets for industrial and medical use. In fact, its range of clinical tablets are designed to be routinely sterilised; a process that would defeat most gadgets, rugged or not.

The CL900 is more of a business-focused device, with a slim profile and all-black exterior. Like its sibling devices, it features a face of nigh-unbreakable gorilla glass (put down the golf club… I said nigh unbreakable. As in, almost.) It's tested in compliance with MIL-STD-810G, and carries an IP52 rating which indicates dust resistance and some water resistance (light rain shouldn't pose a problem).

The tablet runs on an Intel Atom Z670 processor, a single-core 32-bit chip with a clock speed of 1.5GHz. Graphics are Intel on-board, and memory is 2GB of DDR2 800. Yes, these are low specs, but this is a latest-generation Intel Atom, and the CL900 actually manages to run Windows 7 Professional atop this hardware. I say ‘manages', because it turns out to be rather a stretch.

I found the Windows 7 experience far more sluggish than I've ever seen it. Just navigating between Explorer windows to pull data from a USB stick was laggy. Web browsing using either IE or Firefox resulted in annoying slow page-renders, and flash video – even the tiny, non-fullscreen kind – didn't run smoothly. However, everything I tested did work – if you're using productivity applications that simply require Windows, the CL900 is your ticket to mobility. Just remember you ain't getting on the bullet train… this is the slow ride.

Just out of curiosity, I fired up Futuremark's PCMark 7. The resulting score was 756: the lowest I've seen on this latest version of PCMark, but not nearly as bad as you might expect: it's almost precisely half the score of the Panasonic Toughbook CF-31 – not a tenth or a fifth, but a good solid half. The CL900's SSD (62GB in our test model, also available as 30GB) helps here, giving the CL900 System Storage performance scores that you could only hope to beat with a RAID array or another SSD.

Input is entirely via the 10.1-inch, 1366 x 768 pixel touchscreen, which supports both pen and touch input. The pen docks into the side of the unit, and is powered by a single non-rechargeable AAAA battery (like the common AAA, but with a smaller diameter). This input system, I found, is where the CL900 really falls down.

Like any Windows 7 tablet without a physical keyboard, or an on-screen keyboard provided by the BIOS (which I've yet to see in reality), you simply can't access the BIOS settings, or enter safe mode during the Windows boot process, or engage in any other activity that the Windows 7 on-screen keyboard doesn't work with. Windows 7 is simply not a tablet-optimised operating system, and it feels awfully shoehorned into being one. I fully understand the need for extremely portable Windows 7 devices, with the in-house developed, Windows-only applications so many businesses rely on. However, the OS just doesn't play nice without a keyboard attached.

Anyway.

You've also got a front-facing 1.3MP camera and rear-facing 3MP camera, ideal for any applications requiring image or video capture. Camera quality is what you'd expect of a mobile phone or tablet – nothing exceptional, but images taken under good lighting are clear and recognisable.

Connectivity-wise there's a USB port, SD card slot, Bluetooth 3.0 and Wi-Fi. Wireless WAN (3G) is available as an option. That USB port is particularly useful, given that you're using full-blown Windows 7. If you need to connect up industrial equipment, a USB-to-Serial port adapter, external DVD writer or whatever else you can dream up, it'll work just fine: something you're unlikely to find with current-generation Android or iOS-based tablets.

Battery life is stated at up to eight hours, which I can fully believe. Though I only had a few days in which to test the CL900, I only needed to charge it twice despite running CPU-intensive benchmarks and testing a range of applications. Charge time is just two hours, making it quick to get up and going again if the battery does run flat.

Overall, the Motion CL900 fills a definite niche, but is limited by its performance and Windows 7's mediocre tablet support. A less demanding operating system such as XP would have addressed the former issue, though probably made the latter worse. If you need to run Windows applications on the go, in dusty, dirty or hostile environments, the CL900 is still a good bet – if only because right now, there's nothing better.

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